


Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

by Deafen_the_Satellites



Series: Still How the Strong Survive [3]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Awesome Natasha Romanov, BAMF Natasha Romanov, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, Natasha-centric, POV Natasha Romanov, Pregnancy ambivalence, Red Room (Marvel), Sterilization, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Suicidal Thoughts, Unplanned Pregnancy, nonconsensual medical procedures, pregnancy loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 10:05:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9603215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deafen_the_Satellites/pseuds/Deafen_the_Satellites
Summary: Dreams turn to nightmares and nightmares turn to dreams. The nights Natasha wanders through a wilderness of mirrors where her muddied past, twisted and reformed by time, drugs, and modification form fantasies as real as memories.  She flows through different relationships with her body and those around her.Natasha has a complicated history with gestation, to say the least.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Eurythmics' _Sweet Dreams ___.
> 
> This is part of the Still How the Strong Survive series. Read my other story, [Honey, If You Stay I’ll Be Forgiven](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8270761) for background on some of the characters and instances referenced in this story. See the end for more notes. 
> 
> Many thanks once again to [Femme_Daltia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Femme_Daltia), my lovely beta, for all her edits, especially while she was preparing to move to a new state. I hope to visit Budapest with her someday, just to see if we come away with very different memories of the experience.

_She is sixteen. She runs through the bitter February night from a field of blood, tripping over dead men who she’s known like brothers, like fathers, like uncles._

_And, in the case of one, like a lover._

_Her boots are filled with slush, she’s lost a glove, her hand is cut, blood slicking her rifle.  She can’t remember when she last ate. Or slept._

_She’s operating on pure adrenaline now. On the animal instinct to survive at all costs, to crash through the forest, search for cover. She’s been running for what feels like hours. For what feels like forever. She’s alone now, no one for miles. But she can’t stop running._

_And it begins._

* * *

 

_She is nineteen, six years younger than Alexei. She’s younger than he realizes, the powers that be tacked a few extra years on to her age when they arranged for the two to meet by “happenstance”. Still, he seems so buoyantly, painfully young as he stands behind her before a mirror, arms wrapped around her waist, untying her robe to run his hands over the slight swell of her belly, still imperceptible to those who don’t know her intimately._

_Well, no one really knows her intimately. Alexei thinks he does, he knows her body, knows where to stroke her, how to make her come._

_But he doesn’t know he’s a mark.  Doesn’t know she reads and photographs his correspondence. Doesn’t know she has training far beyond that of the chemistry student he thinks he met in Yekaterinburg._

_Doesn’t know it’s all been a lie._

* * *

 

_A flood of liquid soaks through the wool of her uniform trousers, running down her leg, dripping into the snow._

_Not now. God, no, not now._

_She’s a girl raised by military men. She was hardly naïve when she and Kolya had their first exploratory fumblings in a stall, trying to keep quiet while the rest of the unit slept just meters away in the barn where they'd taken refuge on a night when the rain came down in sheets and the road was so muddy that there had been no point trying to press forward to the front.  She wasn’t a child. She knew what fucking was, much as Ivan had tried to watch his tongue around her._

_Kolya had been scared shitless.  Barely seventeen and driven by fear, lust, and a crushing sense of his own mortality, he had mostly let himself be guided by her. As if she knew what she was doing._

_But now?  She has nothing to go on.  She’s been scared since she first realized her lack of bleeding wasn’t due to malnourishment and stress, that her vomiting wasn’t from rotting, infested provisions, that she was growing in places she shouldn’t be._

_She hasn’t prepared for this. Honestly? She figured she’d be dead by now.  Just like Kolya and the others._

_The first few times her body seizes and leaves her breathless, she clings to a tree for support. When it passes, she limps further down the road.  She is wandering in the night with no idea where she is going._

* * *

 

_She is thirteen, lying in the infirmary, listening to the icy sleet beat against the windows and rattle the heavy shutters in great heaving gusts. She hurts too much to sleep._

_The older girls never talked about it hurting. You don’t admit to pain in the Red Room.  You clean your wounds out of sight, injured animals are the first to be taken down. You never show them you are wounded._

_She’s hungry. Couldn’t eat before surgery and she’s slept through the mealtime after.  
_

_She'll heal quickly. Black Widows always do._

**(She was thirteen fucking years old, couldn’t they have just left her alone for a few more years?!?)**

_She won’t jeopardize a mission with a baby now. It’s easier that way. She will always be useful, always be ready_

**(To comply)**

* * *

 

_She has given up trying to figure out how old she is. Age is a number irrelevant to her lived reality. She sits on the edge of the bed, Liho curled up next to her. Her loose t-shirt is pulled up to reveal her belly, heavy with child. It will be any day now._

_Bucky, still grimy from the mission he’s walked in the door from barely three minutes ago, is on his knees in front of her, his hand tentatively placed on her belly. His hands are cold, it is February after all, and he’s brought the chill in with him._

_She’d been at mission control, monitoring the situation.  It had been gently suggested to her, a few months back, that it was really best for her not to be in the field for the time being.  As much as she had threatened the others with what would happen should they start treating her like she was fragile – “I may not be able to kill you twelve different ways right now but I could manage at least five.” – she wasn’t too resistant to the idea.  Much as she doesn’t like to admit it, she gets tired so easily these days._

_Serum or not, pregnancy’s a bitch._

_Some days she can’t wait for it to be over. Can’t wait to be done with the endless medical exams._

_It’s not every day two serum enhanced individuals procreate. Nobody really knows what to expect in terms of outcomes but what is certain is that there will be several journal articles summing up the results of every lab test she has undergone. Joy._

_The medical community is waking up to the presence of enhanced individuals and how they interact with the health care system.  It’s all still a shot in the dark, trial and error.  She’s undergone monitoring through some old S.H.E.I.L.D and now S.H.O.C contacts, ones with access to her bloodwork and Barnes’.  She’s not an idiot, had there been an indication that the pregnancy wasn’t viable or there was already something seriously wrong with the fetus, she would have ended it.  So far, so good though._

_Natasha is not a fan of ob/gyn visits or medical testing in general. She doesn’t like the thinly concealed curiosity of her doctors because it feels a little too familiar. Some old associations are difficult to shake.  She’s better in these environments than Bucky, that’s for sure. He’s tried his hardest but he panicked shortly before accompanying her on one visit and Steve took her instead. Next time Bucky managed, with Steve there for additional support. He’s never quite admitted it but she thinks he may have been on a serious dose of Xanax when he first saw her ultrasound.  After that he was able to cope through further appointments with her.  He wants to be there in the delivery room with her but, if need be, Steve’s already offered to come at a moment’s notice._

_They had confused the hell out of the clerical staff and technicians in that office.  She’s pretty sure most of them think she’s Bucky and Steve’s surrogate which, she figures, is about the simplest way to describe their bizarre generation spanning family._

_Like most expectant mothers she can’t wait to get her balance and her body back. As a trained martial artist and dancer, losing that surety in how her body moves is unsettling. Worse though, it makes her feel compromised and potentially redundant. She can count up just how many ways she’s vulnerable to attack right now and exactly how she could have exploited those to neutralize a target in a similar position, once upon a time._

_Right now she would have been largely useless to her previous employer and in that line of work useless equaled disposable. She reminds herself that the Red Room can’t touch her now. But back in the day she had killed the weak at the drop of a hat. She’s been feeling karma breathing down her neck throughout this last trimester._

_But then there are the quiet moments like this. When she first felt movement, it nearly broke her heart in an indescribably beautiful way. It felt like the most clandestine thing she’d ever experienced. She’d kept that secret to herself for weeks, hoarding the moments late at night when she knew she was not alone.  That there was someone else there connected to her. It wasn’t until Bucky had asked, concerned and a little sheepish, if she was feeling anything that she began to share this with him._

**_(Neither party will ever speak of it but his phone log indicates that he’s had multiple long conversations with Clint over the last few months, so she’s pretty sure he’s been asking dad related questions. Yes, she reads his call log sometimes, old habits die hard when you were raised to be a spy.)_ **

_The first night after he’d asked, she had woken him and placed his hand on her. When the creature turned over inside her the bed had shifted as he had crept closer, tracking instincts engaged._

_“Was that-?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“Oh my god…” he had marveled, softly, curving his body to fit around hers._

_“I know!”_

_In that moment the whole world fell away and the earth revolved around the two- three - of them._

_Red Room be damned._

_It’s worth it._

* * *

 

_Alexei rests his chin on her shoulder. “We’re going to have a baby, Natasha!”_

_“Yes,” she responds, trying to match his enthusiasm. She hasn’t told her handler yet. This…complicates things. But if it’s part of the role she has to play, so be it. Daily vomiting and everything. Damn._

_“February, right?”_

_“Right.”_

_“Winter’s child.”_

_It isn’t cold now. It’s warm and sunny and his hands are gentle and loving.  To him, it’s real, the child a blessing, a future to plan, a beautiful wife to hold._

_It’s hard not to be swept up by his enthusiasm.  She can make herself believe she wants this, for a little longer at least._

**(The hit was a few weeks later. Alexei’s fighter jet hurtling to the earth. Icarus no more.)**

_He nuzzles up her neck, kissing her behind her right ear, the barest hint of teeth and tongue. There is a suggestion in that kiss. A request. A dare._

_She turns to kiss him in return, backing him toward the bed, and pushing him down._

* * *

 

_It only gets worse. She crumples into the snow, gasping, soaked through._

_It hurts. Oh fuck, it hurts. Dazed, she considers her rifle, on the ground a few feet ahead of her, wondering if it would be better to end it all right now than to die slowly from shock and blood loss, the cold, or infection **.** Any number of slow lingering deaths await her if she continues. _

**(You knew winter though, intimately. Its merciful brutality. You would freeze to death long before sepsis would take you)**

_But the feral streak she’s always had, the orphan in the flames, the child from the rubble, discards that idea before it has time to take root._

_She limps, falls, crawls, and repeats, moving forward through the underbrush.  An animal needs to find a den. She needs shelter._

* * *

 

_She feels a warm hand touch her shoulder.  She turns her head to see Nadya, sliding under the covers in the narrow infirmary bed.  She wraps her arms around Natasha’s small, curled up form._

_Natasha breathes in her warmth. She can’t recall the last time someone held her outside of a grappling hold in the ring._

_“It hurts” she says, shakier than she intends._

_“I never said it didn’t.” says Nadya. At fifteen, she’s senior enough to be the expert here._

* * *

 

_Sam had been the first to know. She had been so miserably sick in the early months that it was hard to keep it a secret._

_There was one day she’d had to leave a briefing twice to hurl her guts up followed by a reprise of this process on the jet a day later. Sheer frustration at her body’s, admittedly normal, reaction to a new houseguest, led her to enjoy beating the shit out of their current wannabe bioweaponeer cum super villian's henchmen more so than usual._

_After the team had secured the scene, somewhere outside Ulaanbataar, and was hopefully too occupied to notice, she ducked around a corner, and vomited up bile._

_When the dry heaves finally subsided, she glanced up toward the shadow cast across her path._

_“Nat? You ok?” Sam was holding his goggles, wings folded back._

_“Yeah” she said, closing her eyes for a moment, inwardly cursing her biology._

_“I don’t think this is food poisoning…”_

_She wiped her mouth and slowly stood up. “Yeah, I came to that conclusion a few weeks ago”_

_“Barnes know yet?” he inquired quietly._

_“Not that I’m aware. He hasn’t slept over recently so he hasn’t witnessed this lovely maternal phenomena up close.”_

_“Here.” Sam handed her a water bottle. “Stay hydrated, alright? If you pass out he’s going to find out a lot faster. No one will believe you just got the vapors from combat stress.”_

_She had to laugh at that._

_Sam cocked his head and smiled. “Are congratulations in order?”_

_She took a long swig of water. She met his eye._

_“I don’t know yet.”_

* * *

 

_She isn’t sure how long she’s been curled up at the base of a tree, snow mounded around her in the start of a shelter. The pain took over, distracting her._

_“Natasha!” hands turn her over._

_“I thought you were dead! I found your rifle a ways back, there was a blood trail. Are you wounded?”_

_Ivan. Angel of the flames._

_“No!” she gasps. “I…Kolya and I…it’s happening!”_

_“What? Natasha, what do…oh. Oh God.”_

_“I’m sorry!”_

_“Natasha” he gathers her up and lifts her like he had when she was a child.  He sets off as quickly as he can. “I didn’t know. God help me, I didn’t know.”_

* * *

 

_In some versions of this memory she remembers a Spice Girls cd, remembers Nadya singing softly into the crook of her neck, pressing the shape of the English words against her bare skin. The older Widows periodically smuggled in contraband on return from the field. Nadya had likely picked up the album in Gdansk._

**(“I need some love like I’ve never needed love before”)**

_She won’t cry. Widows don’t cry._

_She is the favorite prodigy. The one who will make or break the entire program.  She'd had a kill in the field before she had one in the training ring. She hadn’t let doubt or any strange sympathy for her target come into play._

_As far as they know._

**(“Silly games that you were playing/Empty words we both were saying”)**

_She misses Evgeniya then. The few weeks she’d known her, undercover in a boarding school, had opened a whole new world to her, a world of hope and dreams and childish fantasies._

_Evgeniya had blushed and giggled when late night conversations had turned to sex.  She was a good girl, and at twelve, sheltered, still knew very little. The “bad girls” in the class talked about boys and penises and Evgeniya shrieked “Eww!” every time._

_Natasha had laughed along, and realized, for the first time, just how wrong it was that she understood sex so much better than the “bad girls” did.  She’d already started that element of her training, flat on her back on a cot in a fluorescently lit room with Madame coaching her on breathing as fingers, and then larger items, were inserted into her.  She was beginning to learn to weaponize this position._

**(“Are you as good as I remember baby, get it on, get it on”)**

_She wasn’t innocent like Evgeniya but she was genuinely confused by the concept of a “first time”._

* * *

 

_Particularly memorable was the surprise baby shower the rest of the team had thrown her. It wasn’t half bad, considering it was arranged mostly by men, with input from Laura, Hill, and Wanda “What-makes-you-think-I-know-how-to-host-a-baby-shower?” Maximoff. On the one hand it was sweet – for once in his life Tony had resisted the urge to be theatrical and had quietly handed her the card with the…considerable…check toward a college fund. But as the event wore on she increasingly had to fight the urge to scream._

_She doesn’t want to be the “Mommy Avenger”.  Sure she’s fine with the joke that she and Steve are the metaphorical parental figures, training the next generation. But that’s different than being viewed as a lactating cradle rocker rather than the assassin who the Red Room unleashed onto the world and then could never recapture.  She may not be proud of all the things she’s done but damn it, regimes toppled due to the secrets she’s stolen, the lives she’s taken._

_Half the time it feels like everyone looks at her and just sees the pregnancy. Like she doesn’t exist. Like “Pregnant Natasha” is who she is now.  Given the various childhood traumas of those in their circle, she’s feeling the pressure to be the perfect mommy to make up for those who failed them.  Reassurances that she’ll be a ‘great mother’ increasingly feel like admonitions that she ‘better be a great mother’.  It’s like she’s already being criticized for future failures, cloaked in glowing, cutesy advice._

_She had stomped out into the kitchen, loudly opening and banging shut cabinets, not entirely sure what she’d been looking for. She had bumped into the edge of a counter and swore. At a little past six months she was big enough to be getting in her own way these days and it was making her irritable._

_Wanda had appeared in the doorway and Nat had gone off on her out of sheer frustration. Wanda had listened in that impassive, slightly judgmental way she had and when Nat stopped for air, replied with,“I get it.”_

_“No, you fucking don’t!” Nat had snapped._

_Wanda tilted her head. “I thought I was pregnant when I was sixteen, for like, eight hours. I responded by going out, drinking too much and using copious amounts of drugs. I get it.”_

_Pregnant at sixteen. Yeah, Nat remembered that. She’d been thinking about it a lot lately, given what stage she was at in this pregnancy. Remembered how she thought the world was going to end when she figured it out, one miserable night while keeping watch from a tank ditch . Remembered how she thought the world was going to end when it was all over, all for nothing._

_Red blood on white snow. Lost girls in a dark forest. It’s an old story._

_She had closed her eyes and gripped the edge of the sink, resting her head on the cabinet._

_“C’mon,” said Wanda. “Let’s get out of here.”_

_They had snuck out and headed to Wanda’s place, Clint’s old apartment in Bed-Stuy._

_She got a text from Bucky as they climbed the stairs from the A train._

_-Should I be worried?_

_-No._

_-K._

_They turned up angry music, made popcorn, smoked a joint, threw darts, followed by knives, at Clint’s old targets on the walls and generally pretended Nat’s pregnancy didn’t exist._

_Ok, maybe Wanda did get it._

_She had eventually wandered home in the wee hours of the morning, past the piles of shower gifts, stripped and climbed into bed. Bucky woke and started to ask “Hey. What happe-“_

_“There are far better things you could be doing with your tongue right now, Barnes.”_

_He had gone slowly, painfully so, and she felt the bitterness rise again in her as she urged him unsuccessfully to go harder, faster, rougher._

_“For god’s sake, Barnes, I’m not going to break. Fuck me like you mean it.”_

_He hadn’t picked up the pace._

_Finally, in a wash of frustration, guilt, fear, and personal anger the likes of which the Red Room trained her never to really feel, she had grabbed him by his hair and gritted out,_

_“You used to know how. You weren’t afraid to hurt me in Vladivostok-“_

_That had produced a response. In a flash he had slammed her into the mattress, pinning her wrists on either side of her head, finally resting his weight on top of her._

_She was way over the line and she knew it.  It had taken Bucky ages to acclimate back to enjoying sex, muddled as his dreams were of hurting people, his body a weapon.  He still had nightmares that mingled desire, lust, horror, and shame and unlike the confused dreamt histories with Steve, he knew every moment in Vladivostok had been real._

_“Is this how you want to play it, Romanoff?” he asked savagely, biting kisses into her neck.  “Really? Fine. In six fucking months, after the kid is out and you’ve healed, ask me again and if you want it I’ll have you so hard you’ll scream my name, torn and bloody. If that’s really what you want, I’ll do it. But not now, not fucking now, Natasha.”_

_He had released her wrists and shuffled off her, out of bed, casting around in the dark for his clothes.  He continued speaking while pulling them on, without looking at her._

_“Maybe you won’t break but I might” he mumbled.  “Why do I always fall for the ones with something to prove? Story of my goddamn life.”_

_He had cursed as he wrenched his sneakers on “You scare the shit out of me, Natalia. Always have. Nothing is going to change that. You’re a goddamn valkyrie and you’ll terrify me even more when you’ve got a kid in your arms because if there is anyone who can seamlessly slide between jobs and identities, it’s you. You’ll be even more of a testament to how grossly incompetent we all are next to you. Believe it or not, I’m actually ok with that.”_

_He had paused for a moment at the bedroom door._

_“I know a thing or two about not understanding how my body works anymore and trying to live up to both my expectations and those of everyone else around me, struggling to tell what I actually want. I can’t say it’s anywhere near the same but I need you to fucking talk to me.”_

_He turned and headed out into the dark. She heard a metallic scrape as he grabbed his keys off the table followed by the slam of the front door._

* * *

 

_She slides in and out of consciousness, trying not to give into the gentle siren song of the cold night. Ivan doesn’t deserve to have her die in his arms._

_Eventually she comes to, leaning against the exterior wall of a cabin, Ivan pounding on the door.  She stumbles inside when it opens, caught by warm hands and the sound of women's voices.  They carry her to a room with a bed, stripping her uniform and boots off as they go._

_A borrowed nightgown is thrown over her shoulders and she comes back to herself on all fours, gazing up at an icon of St. Margarita, the patron saint of childbirth, emerging from the belly of a dragon._

_A dragon claws its way out of her.  It seems to take hours, hours of sweat, of blood, of shit, of chills, of prayers half forgotten._

_The black ribbon on her finger is nearly shredded by this point. Kolya, honest boy that he was, had tied it there as a promise when she’d told him.  A promise he’d tried to keep.  But this is not a time nor place where promises and hope last long._

* * *

 

_To his credit, Bucky had returned the next evening.  To hers, she had finally admitted to him that she was scared.  Finally admitted she was a wounded animal._

_They licked their respective wounds together._

* * *

 

_She straddles Alexei and slips her tongue into his mouth.  He’s grown on her, foolish idealist that he is. He’s a hell of a pilot and he tries for swagger and bravado but there's a persistent sweetness to him that confounds his efforts.  He’s just never going to be the hard drinking, flint-edged fighter pilot archetype that he aspires to. He's advanced quickly in the cosmonaut program, he has few vices._

_Unless amateur espionage can be counted as a vice.  He has two classified dossiers hidden in the back of the closet which Natasha knows will get him in trouble._

_She’s already passed this intel along to her handler._

_She draws her knee up between his legs and he moans into her mouth.  Sex with him is still work, but it is a lot more fun than it has been with other targets. He’s young and clean and firm and doesn’t wrap up his entire self-worth in the size of his cock._

_She still plots her moves, knows she can lead the game so long as she lets him believe he’s in charge.  She picks positions he likes, performs acts she can get a response from him with. Open assertiveness would put him off and she knows her darker desires would be out of character for his Natasha._

_But she enjoys the time she spends in bed with him. It isn’t hard to allow herself to pretend that she really is in love with him with all the runaway passion of a nineteen year old._

_‘I guess I found my first, Evgeniya.’ She thinks to herself as she lets him roll her over onto her back and slides himself inside her. ‘Which in that case means I got knocked up by my first. Well, we’ve been married almost a year. So I guess that still makes me a ‘good girl’’_

* * *

 

_After a moment, she feels a kick. Bucky smiles slightly._

_“That’s the last mission I’m going on for a while” he says, looking up at her._

_“Really?” she had assumed as much but it’s nice to hear him say it aloud. He’d cut it pretty close going on this one. She’d been a little ticked when she saw his name on today’s roster after he’d already flown out with the team._

_He tries to cock an eyebrow and winces as the motion tugs on the taped-up cut above it._

_“Right, Nat. I don’t believe in letting my soldiers go around without back up. Did you really think I’d leave you on your own in this firefight?”_

_“Wow. Make me feel a little better about labor, will you?”_

_Though, to hear Clint tell it, parenthood was kind of a perpetual firefight.  After supervising his daughter’s first slumber party he met her for coffee half asleep on his feet._

_“I tell you, Nat, is was like Budapest all over again.”_

_She had stared at him over her cup. “You and I have very different memories of Budapest.”_

_That was the day she had told him she was pregnant.  He was so happy for her he almost cried. She was pretty sure the tears weren’t entirely from sleep deprivation._

* * *

 

_The Ritual made her a woman. Her skills make her a Widow._

_But of course that isn’t all of it. Her fair skin, her flame colored hair, her breasts, already filling out – those are assets too._

_She is the ruthless little spider in the shadows, endlessly caught in a web, vanishing before the eyes of the world. But she is also the perfect Red Maiden, the prize for anyone who fancies himself a hero, when visibility is unavoidable._

_The Ritual means that she will soon be assigned to lie beneath old men as they move inside her. The Ritual prevents complications from arising – conflicts of interest, messy medical interventions._

_It is rumored that a few girls will be spared the Ritual. A few will be kept in case a longer con is called for. One where a pregnant wife or mistress is needed. Svetlana might be tracked for that. She’s pretty enough but not that pretty. Decent at espionage but not stellar. Patient enough for a long con._

_They won’t waste Natasha on that sort of mission. She’s too valuable already. She’s skilled enough at subterfuge to leave no trace, a budding enough beauty to attract the eyes of many._

_She doesn’t want it. She doesn’t even like sex or how they train for it. She wants to stay in the dark, curled up here in Nadya’s arms, forever. Safe from the storm._

**(“A dream of you and me together”)**

_“What’s it like?” she asks “The sex part?”_

_She feels Nadya shrug. “Boring, usually. We don’t really have sex, though. We “physically engage the target with amorous intent.”_

_Ow. Laughing hurts._

_“Did you ever want them? You know, babies?” The words feel strange to say, the idea so distant to her._

_Nadya shifts her weight. “I don’t know. Why? Do you?”_

_“I do if you do.”_

_There is a pause._

_“Maybe…” Nadya begins slowly. “Yes, yes I did.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Well…” Nadya hesitates, as if she’s never put this into words before “because when it’s inside you they can’t deny it’s yours. They can’t claim credit for it. They can’t take it away.” Her hand slides down over Natasha’s midsection, carefully remaining north of the bandages. “For a while at least, you aren’t alone. Someone’s there with you.”_

_Her voice is a low whisper, barely audible. “Afterward there’s someone to remember you. To notice and care when you’re gone.”_

_They are all orphans with no pasts. When they die, there will be no one left to grieve for them._

_Natasha has never really thought about it like that. Ironic to learn it now, with Nadya's hand resting on her belly, evocatively swollen post surgery, hours after the possibility was gone forever._

_“I’ll remember you” she promises._

_Nadya buries her face in the back of Natasha’s neck, hugging her closer. “You remember everything.”_

**(Is that so? Then why had you forgotten Kolya and Ivan until this dream?)**

* * *

 

_She drifts, feverish, in and out of sleep. She’s in a cabin deep in the forest, on chicken feet. No, that’s not right. Baba Yaga told her she was brave. Vasilisa the Brave. No, magic wasn’t real. But how else to explain how Ivan found both her and this cabin?_

_There are voices._

_“Are you the father?”_

_“What? No! I’m the closest thing **she** has to a father, I would never-“_

_“Forgive me, times, being what they are…”_

_“Kolya...of course she and Kolya…God, how did I not know?_

_“Young girls will keep many things a secret from those they do not wish to disappoint. Where is this Kolya now?”_

_“He’s dead.”_

_“Ah. I’d wondered. She cried out his name a few times, I wasn’t sure if it was yours.”_

_“No, I’m Ivan. She’s Natasha.”_

_“She’s lucky you found her.”_

_“If I’d gotten her here sooner would-“_

_“No. She wasn’t far enough along. This was never about saving the child. It was about saving her.”_

_“Does she know?”_

_“In her heart, yes, I think so.”_

_Later, Natasha feels the bed dip slightly as someone sits on the edge. Ivan’s calloused hand gently rests on her head, stroking her hair twice. She feels his beard brush against her neck as he kisses her behind her right ear, clumsy and self-conscious. For a man like Ivan, hardened by violence and deprivation, affection will never sit comfortably. It is a gesture she hasn't felt since she was a little girl kept awake by nightmares. She is engulfed by deep sleep before she can feel him get up to leave._

* * *

 

_“I was a last minute substitute anyway and Steve read me the riot act for being on this mission. Something to the effect of “Buck, you know how much you mean to me but if you die- again- and leave Nat to do this alone- well, you just better hope you’re dead for real this time because I will fucking kill you.”_

_“There’s reasons ‘Steven’ is on the list –_

* * *

 

_“Rose” she says, her voice half dead, as she holds the too small body wrapped in a blanket embroidered with a motif of Mokosh, the red woman with her arms upraised, flanked by two horseman. It’s good linen, beautiful needlework, saved for special occasions. If she were in a better frame of mind she might appreciate the kindness in letting her, a complete stranger, use it._

_Roses are delicate and fragile and everything she isn’t.  Roses are left behind in the gardens of girlhood, in the myths made of the times before the War, before the violence, before the blood._

_Roses live in summer.  It is not summer now._

_Rose lies buried beneath the snow, in a forest far away._

* * *

 

_“Fyodor” Alexei utters, between kisses, pulling her robe off her shoulders. “My father’s name! Or Anzhelika, my mother’s!”_

_So this job is going to involve even more creativity than usual. Creating covers for actual little people._

_Alexei breaks off the kiss. “What were your parents’ names?”_

* * *

 

_“Nadya, don’t go.”_

_“It’s almost light, Natasha. I have to get back to the dormitory before they notice I’m gone.”_

_She leans over and kisses Natasha behind her right ear, quick and thoughtless._

_“You’ll get to train with us now. The real Widows.  You’ll get your belt and everything.”_

_The belt with the red hourglass.  The mark of a Widow, sculpted from clay, honed like a knife, hollowed out for the secrets of others.  A maker’s mark on a deadly weapon._

_Red. The color of blood. Of beauty. Of fertility. Of misdirection._

* * *

 

_-“along with Nadya”. Natasha finishes. They have chosen not to find out if it is a girl or boy_

**(Why? Why would two people with so much uncertainty in their lives and lives past leave anything to the unknown?)**

_A childhood friend for them each._

_“We don’t have to name him Steven if you don’t want-“_

_“He’s my friend too, asshole.”_

_“I’m just saying…”_

_He’s ceded naming rights to her. He knows that the simple act of naming something, in some way claiming it as your own, has been denied to her for so long._

_She hasn’t told him the full name she has decided on for a daughter –_

**(It would be a daughter of course. She’d be blessed and cursed to have one to remind her of every single girl who’d never escaped the Red Room, wouldn’t she?)**

_Nadezhda Margarita.  “Hope” and “cluster of flowers”. Because some small flowers do bloom in the dead of winter, blossoming through the snow._

_She will be Nadya. Natasha will keep that promise seeing as she is now in a time and place where promises have a chance. But she won’t begrudge Steve, her godfather, calling her Peggy._

_Bucky had been the one to tell Steve. She had it on good authority from Sam that the two of them had cried and then Steve had gone out and purchased the cutest teddy bear he could find._

_God, the manly tears and mid-century Brooklynese she is going to have to put up with while still sore.  Well, she’s withstood far worse._

_The kicking grows stronger. Bucky places both hands on her now, feeling the rhythm. He is so much older than Alexei-_

**(But hadn’t Alexei been impossibly young?)**

_His optimism is tempered with caution and worry. He is frightened. Why wouldn’t he be?_

_She is too, she’s never, in any of the memories, been this far along._

**(Alexei’s child had passed as blood and tissue after she had returned from his funeral, the night before she was taken back to the Red Room. It had never been meant to last outside the heat of summer, the heat of the moment. Just as well. Nadya had perhaps exaggerated their agency. The Red Room could and would, in fact, take it away from you if they so choose.)**

_But there is wonder in his eyes too, at watching her grow over the months. Wonder in the face of decades of pain, heartbreaking and awesome to behold._

_He hadn’t run when she’d told him. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he had._

_Well, she wouldn’t have been too happy. And not just because Steve would have gone into Disappointed Super Soldier mode and lectured him about how if you got a girl in trouble you stayed for the long haul. There were moments where Steve really did live up to his Captain America reputation and they were pretty hilarious. Although less so if it was your pregnancy at the heart of the speech._

_To be fair, Steve justifiably had Feelings regarding growing up without a father and he was damned if Natasha was going to go through what Sarah Rogers had.  He was in it for the long haul, that was for sure, ready to be Super Godfather. It was when the three of them- Natasha, flanked by her two horseman, her bogatyrs -had viewed that ultrasound together that she fully appreciated that she finally had a place in the world. She didn’t need the kid to teach her that she wasn’t alone but the reminder was gratifying._

_Bucky had made clear he was in the picture however she wanted to do this.  He’d emphasized “however”._

_She’d considered ending it at first. Had even_ _made an appointment. She had been swiftly nearing the end of her first trimester and really didn’t want to drag it out further._

_She had known Sam wouldn’t ever let on that he knew. No one would be the wiser._

_But one morning, when she was already late for a deployment, on her knees throwing up yet again, that had all changed. As she sat back up, seriously contemplating calling in sick, she had caught sight of her belt on the floor. At ten weeks, her suit was getting a bit snug when cinched._

_The sight of the red hourglass had dredged-up a memory that had been nagging at her, much as she’d actively tried to suppress it._

_She was fourteen, suited up and sweating with fever, throwing up in the toilet of the dormitory. She knew she would be punished if she didn’t make it to the helipad within the next ten minutes. The younger girls could take sick days. The Widows couldn’t._

_Nadya had held her hair back as she finished her latest bout of vomiting, gently pulling Natasha up to lean against the solid warmth of her body._

_“Come on, Natasha. We have to go now. This is a refresher course that we can't afford to miss.” She wiped Natasha’s face, running the cool, damp cloth down the back of her neck and over her collar bone. “Try to look alive.”_

_“I can’t”, murmured Natasha. She leaned her head back on Nadya’s shoulder. Nadya, the one person she could ever admit weakness to. She should know better, the rules of the Red Room were absolute, but right then she trusted Nadya not to use it against her._

_They stayed still for a moment and Nadya stroked her hair. Then she rose, pulling Natasha up with her. She turned Natasha to face her, zipped her suit the rest of the way to her throat and adjusted Natasha’s belt._

_“You can. If there is anyone who can do this, it’s you. They expect Yulia to come out on top today because you skipped breakfast which you haven’t done since you had bronchitis when you were eight. They know you’re sick and are ready to mark you down.  Prove them wrong. Yulia will be insufferable if she pulls into top place. You’ll hate that. You can do this because you know you want to. Even if you feel like shit in the process.”_

_Natasha half smiled through groggy, heavy-lidded eyes. It would be so easy to just curl up in bed and deal with the repercussions later. But Nadya was absolutely right. She was too competitive and to stubborn to admit defeat. The fact that it was going be miserable would only make it feel so much better when it was over, after she succeeded. She would embrace any opportunity to defy their instructors’ expectations._

_Years later in her apartment on the other side of the world, tears drawing painfully close at the memory, Natasha had grit her teeth against the acrid taste of bile, “Fuck.”_

_Fine. Yes, she both did and didn't want to do this. Nadya and the other girls had preyed heavily on her mind every day for the last few weeks, delaying her final decision. Nadya had wanted to do this. Nadya would have been really good at this._

_She had leaned back against the wall opposite the toilet. She would have been approximately this far along when she'd lost Alexei’s child.  The miscarriage had been a relief, but the few weeks of playacting as an excited mother-to-be had opened up possibilities she hadn’t previously considered. For the first time she was aware of the futures that could await her if she ever got out of the Red Room. She had wanted to find a moment to talk about this with Nadya._

_But Nadya was already dead. Had been for nearly a year by the time Natasha returned to the Red Room._

_She didn’t feel guilt for arranging to be rid of something Nadya and some of the other girls had wanted. Natasha was free of ethical quibbles regarding abortion. That wasn’t the problem._

_It was the old survivor’s guilt that cropped up from time to time, simply for being alive and able to do something so mundane and normal. If there was shame to be had in the experience, it was for making it this far, for even being able to have the choice to keep it._

_To the best of her knowledge, she is the only operative given the opportunity to say “Fuck you” to the Red Room. The only one of their experiments to fuck and conceive without their approval and with another one of their precious experiments to boot. Well, maybe that makes her one of two, a select sample-size nevertheless._

_The only way she’s ever been able to overcome guilt was to face it head on and just live._

_She had canceled the appointment in the end. Said she miscarried, couldn’t quite bring herself to say she had changed her mind. Or rather, that she had admitted to what she actually wanted._

_Rebellion is a very stupid reason to have a kid. But it was her reason.  Maybe it was selfish. But it was the only truthful explanation she'd had at the time. She was Natasha Romanoff and she could do this, she wanted to do this._

_Now, in hindsight, she acknowledges that they aren’t really set up to raise a kid, damaged people working in a dangerous line of work.  Nat has a complicated relationship with gestation, to say the least. Bucky is still in love with Steve – although, to be fair he has studiously avoided alluding to that ever since she told him she was carrying his child. He is a gentleman, after all._

_Heroes are meant to carry the hopes and dreams of nations.  But who carries theirs?_

_For now, she does.  She resents it at times, the weight of expectation, just as Steve had resented his shield._

_But not enough to not try._

_'You can do this because you know you want to. Even if you feel like shit in the process.'_

_Spite and rebellion aside, she isn’t sure why she's going through with this.  Maybe she’s curious.  Maybe she just wants to see this story through to the end, just one time. Maybe because she's finally gotten knocked up in the least dark timeline, in the one version of her life that doesn't feel like a cobbled-together fairytale, the old kind, full of blood and dark woods and hungry, waiting teeth._

**(Ironic, then, that she’s friends with a guy who slept for seventy years and she shares her bed with an amalgamation of Ilya Muromets and Koschei the Deathless. She wonders, in idle moments, just how many fables of super humans may have an ounce of truth to them. Perhaps she, Steve, and Bucky aren’t the first generation of super soldiers after all.)**

_Maybe because she knows it isn’t real and is was worth the exploration-_

**(Ah, good. You’ve finally realized. You’ll wake soon.)**

_Maybe because finally, she can decide whether or not she wants to. Finally can use her body for herself, finally has conceived without pretense, without deceit, without desperation._

_Finally has something they can’t take away from her._

_She is tired of being the last person standing.  She wants to pass the memories to someone who will succeed her._

_Someone else who will remember everything._

_Bucky stares at his hands, still resting upon her._

_“Nat, I have no idea what we’re doing.”_

**(I never said it was easy)**

_“Neither do I.  You were the oldest. At least you know how to change a diaper.”_

_“True.” His fingers lightly graze her scar from Odessa, as they do when he is distracted or anxious._

_She pulls him up for a kiss. “You and I are both the children of winter.  As this one will be. We survive.  It’s what we do. We’ll be fine."  
_

_She kisses him for a long moment then feels a tremor within her, a deep ache slowly unfurling like pressure against a bruise._

**(A beginning and an end)**

_She breaks off the kiss._

_Liho lifts her head, tail twitching inquisitively._

_“Barnes, you stink. Get in the shower and clean up.”_

_He tries to duck back in, smirking. “Aw, c’mon, don’t bait me and then push me away.”_

_“You need a shower and if you don’t take one right now,” she says evenly, breathing deeply, “I don’t know when your next opportunity will be.”_

_He looks at her quizzically._

_“Oh” he says, the light dawning on him “Oh…”_

* * *

 

“Nat.  Hey, Nat, you’re dreaming.”

She woke in her bed with Bucky beside her. She invited him over sometimes, to give Steve a break. Post-HYDRA recovery took a village and Bucky needed to be able to depend on more than one person.  Particularly when there were things he still couldn't bring himself to talk about with Steve yet. 

They figured it was inevitable that some of their mutual acquaintances would assume this meant they were an item, which wasn’t totally untrue, but wasn’t really the whole story either.  They were intimate in the unavoidable way people who regularly bruised each other while thrashing around in the thrall of nightmares, in the way of two old soldiers who slept back to back to ward off the cold with the reassurance of another living person, vulnerable in the night and contemplative and reserved in the morning.  They were intimate in the way that two people were when they had cried in each others' arms and kept each others' secrets.   

Her face was wet.

“You were crying in your sleep. The dreams?”

The dreams. Nights like this she wandered through a wilderness of mirrors where her muddied past, twisted and reformed by time, drugs, and modification formed fantasies as real as memories. 

“Yeah.” She responded thickly. “Sorry to wake you.”

“Right, I wake you and Steve up how many times a week? About time you returned the favor.”

He pulled her closer, his hand over her stomach. Flat, taut, empty. As it had always been. As it would always be. 

**(Just because it only happened in your head doesn’t mean any of it wasn’t real)**

Dreams turn to nightmares and nightmares turn to dreams.

She shivered.

“You ok?”

“Yes. No. Whatever”

“Yeah…Know the feeling. Wanna talk about it?”

“Not really, no.”

“Ok”, he said as he leaned over and kissed her, sleep-sweet and warm, just below her right ear.

**Author's Note:**

> •Again, read my previous fic, _Honey, If You Stay I’ll Be Forgiven _for background on the characters and situations referenced, especially in regards to Evgeniya, Nadya, and Vladivostok.__
> 
>  _ ___  
> • In some comics canon, Ivan Petrovich Bezukhov rescued an infant Natasha and raised her prior to her entry into the Red Room in her late teens/twenties. In Marjorie Liu's comic, _The Name of the Rose _, Nikolai, or Kolya, was Natasha’s first husband. That particular timeline in this story functions to fill in the scenes of Natasha’s WWII backstory. I posit that this is happening in February of 1945, in order to mesh with Natasha’s 1928 birth year in that comic and my decision to make December her birth month. Fun to think about: February of 1945 is about when Steve and Bucky “died” (although the MCU is a bit inconsistent with its dates, to the chagrin of fic writers.)__
> 
>  _ ___  
> •Alexei Shostakov, Natasha’s other husband (sometimes he’s her first husband, depends on the series) is a canon character, however I’ve largely invented this particular characterization. He’s less of a cinnamon roll in the comics and he’s often a good bit older than I depict him here.
> 
>  _ ___  
> •Lyrics from the Spice Girls song. _2 Become 1 _, which happens to be the first song that I, as a nine year old, realized was about sex.__
> 
>  _ ___  
> •Clint Barton owns a building in Bed-Stuy in Matt Fraction's _Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon _series. I figure he still owns it and has kept his apartment in it for when he needs to crash in the city and as a decoy apartment, to keep his family’s address secure. In my ‘verse, Wanda lives there and is the super. Stay tuned for a future Wanda POV fic that may flesh this out.__
> 
>  _ ___  
> •St. Margaret is the patron saint of women in childbirth in Western Europe. There a few other saints who are more commonly associated with childbirth in the Eastern Orthodox Church but the naming significance of Margaret/Margarita was just too good to pass up. Margaret usually translates to "pearl" but also refers to small flowers like daisies. Again. the naming significance was too tempting.
> 
>  _ ___  
> •The words krasniy (red) and krasiviy (beautiful) have similar etymology and thus Slavic associations with the color red predate Soviet color symbolism. Red Maidens crop up in artwork and folklore, much of it pre-Christian. There are healing incantations to stop bleeding that invoke the "red maiden sewing". Basically, a Red Maiden can be seen as analogous to the beautiful fairytale princess the hero wins for his labors.
> 
>  _ ___  
> •I acknowledge that this fairytale character is usually Vasilisa the Beautiful or Vasilisa the Fair but I fell in love with a version of the story as told by Mariana Meyer, illustrated by K.Y. Craft, when I was six and that version was Vasilisa the Brave.
> 
>  _ ___  
> •Mokosh, who has a few name variants, is a pre-Christian deity associated with the concept of Damp or Moist Mother Earth. She is associated with fertility and women’s work (including spinning – and spiders like the black widow are natural spinners) and depictions of her were common in folk art, particularly embroidery, into the late 19th-early 20th Century.
> 
>  _ ___  
> •Koschei the Deathless is a figure in Slavic myth, often a skeletal, abductor nemesis. He hides his death away in a difficult to reach place, sort of like a horcrux.
> 
>  _ ___  
> •Ilya Muromets is a bogatyr or warrior. He wakes another bogatyr named Svyatogor and the two become close friends. Ultimately they discover a coffin. Ilya Muromets lies in it but discovers it is too big for him. Svyatogor comes to understand that it is meant for him and he lies in the coffin. As the lid closes, he passes his superhuman strength to Svyatogor. I feel like you can draw parallels to Ilya understanding that the coffin isn’t for him and Bucky acknowledging that it’s time to stay out of cryostasis. Furthermore, if Svyatogor is Steve and he passes strength (or a shield) to Ilya/Bucky as he dies…somebody save me from this rabbit hole.
> 
>  _ ___  
> •I am going with my headcanon from _Honey, If You Stay I’ll Be Forgiven _where I posit that Natasha might have a December birthday and one of Bucky’s birthdates, given as March 10th. So they are both winter babies.__


End file.
